Denys Nykula

I do blame few EU citizens coming to help fight against the empire, for Ukrainians and Finns etc having to carry almost the entire weight. This isn’t a matter of conscription however, fuck conscription due to all the abuse it involves. International volunteer effort is needed.

Thanks for a detailed response. It feels weird that in a globalized world an attack on a people isn’t felt by others as an attack on someone they know, with whom they or their friends directly talk online, whose loss would personally affect their projects and friend circles. I admit I also don’t know many names from African countries, for example, or from Palestine, or even from some EU regions. Inequality of recognition and, as a consequence, a lack of personally felt solidarity, is definitely a weakness of the world-system we live in; well, not for the system itself but for the invaded peoples.

I understand your position, despite disagreeing with it, as it was once mine as well. Would you mind answering two questions on a related, but different topic, closer to OP? First, when a more authoritarian party comes to rule in your country, are you confident they’ll keep conscription more-or-less volunteer, or will one of the first things they do, besides stripping minority rights, be making refusal punishable, canceling alternative service options, widening the recruitment age range and making most people with disabilities not “serious” enough serve as well? Second, since the war on Europe has been ongoing for twelve years, why wait until your country is invaded, and not go here to help defend so that it doesn’t get to the point when your state or a neighboring state of yours is invaded?

The existing protections for minorities, if we trace them to Stonewall and the Civil rights movement, are won by minorities organizing self-defense and causing enough ruckus when discriminated that the state starts worrying about its monopoly on violence. Then, when the state, against the discrimination by which the minorities have successfully organized, has a cultural and economic hegemony, the won rights slowly “trickle down” to some (but not all) of its allies, but are quickly rolled back at a whim when their leadership changes if there’s no functioning self-defense remaining and widely supported.

It’s very important not to disband the self-defense after any concession, and to organize it even, especially, when achieved peacefully. I’m from an Eastern European country where LGBT people don’t currently have self-defense, instead trusting the police and NGOs who started promising them protection because European integration requires that. Their promise is an utter lie; there are hundreds of attacks by boneheads (who are not the masses, but rather an extension of the state’s arm of violence) every year and the police does next to nothing, with the NGOs urging the attacked people and their friends to limit themselves to petitioning their representatives, who also do nothing.

What I’m trying to say is, the minorities have to protect themselves whether the state exists or not, and where the state exists, the defense has largely to be targeted against the state discrimination, the police violence, and the religious and press propaganda supported by the state. Once a group is able to protect themselves and their friends, it starts being respected by the majority of the people, so the despotism of the masses is not a threat, unlike the states, who have illegalized and then starved or otherwise killed minorities en masse numerous times. There are states where the situation is at the moment better, but that’s in such contrast to what states in general have done in the past that I can’t help but realize that the protections are temporary and under threat of a rollback at any moment.

I strongly agree about an unmatched level of cooperation being urgently needed for feats like slowing down climate change, but disagree that states are the type of organization required to even imagine it. Every state in history is exactly that, an armed actor, a gang who has militarily forced its way through enough territory to do protection racket over entire peoples. Gangs might introduce democratic elements (parliament, constitution) for efficiency and to calm down those people whom they don’t yet have the potential to repress. Gangs might recruit local population to sustain their numbers or provide skills and knowledge. Gangs might provide a few socially welcome policies in the territories they control, as long as they’re in charge of the provision and haven’t found a way to survive while avoiding them altogether. Gangs might call a truce and maintain it for many years while they’re fighting a bigger, more powerful gang. Some gangs have sold away a part of their weapons and instead rely on protection from neighbor gangs with more impressive arsenals. They’re still gangs, self-sustaining machines of violence, organized armed actors deontologically doomed to set the world on fire, precisely because if one armed actor decides to do good, other armed actors will eat him alive.

I’m hypothetically in favor of abolishing war machines as well, but this can only be achieved if workers organize internationally to overthrow their and every other state everywhere in the world simultaneously. States are literally war machines funded by taxes; everything else they do is done to the extent it helps pacify the people who’d otherwise organize themselves and rise against borders, conscription and being governed rather than governing ourselves. I also understand that fighting against states will probably be comparable to a war in terms of bloodiness and chaos, and will have to repeat whenever a new gang appears and tries to become a state.

My experience is that people who say they’ll definitely enlist and who shame others for being “cowards”, well, mostly haven’t enlisted (too young, too sick, too activist, not AMAB, emigrated at first opportunity) since shit hit the fan. I haven’t enlisted because I have chronic health issues; this didn’t stop cops from distrusting my documents, detaining me and trying to forcefully enlist me. I’m supposed to go through the military medical commision every year but I don’t trust them (only did it once), there’s lots of neglect and abuse happening during the actual war; if I go through it again and this time they disregard my diagnoses, I’ll face prison. I respect those who enlist though, and donated my enlisted friends money for equipment when I had a better salary; I also closed my civilian black-day deposit and lent the military money for a year (the profit covers a part of what I have to pay the lawyer who’ll try to object to my illegal detention and fine).

It seems the disagreement boils down to what position is far-left and what is moderate. It’s worth remembering that there was far-left opposition (against Russian nationalism in particular) to Bolsheviks inside the party, whom they purged in early years, labeling them bourgeois, and tried hard to suppress them from reappearing. The Bolsheviks also got popular by paying lip service to a much different agenda than they implemented, becoming in practice extremely conservative and repressing worker self-government attempts. So I wouldn’t call them far-left, a term that I’d reserve for anarchists and council communists.

Does fare-free also mean tracking-free, or is there still a requirement for a smart card or a phone, with fines for those not carrying one? In Kyiv, the fare tracking application collects history forever, without a retention policy and with a requirement for confirming every cash payment with a full name and phone number, which means municipal IT employees can see where any phone owner was going at any hour today, last month or five years ago. I really hope somewhere in the world systems like these are going away rather than proliferate, actively supported both by municipal government and by local transit rider organization insisting that cash should be banned and riders should start paying a bigger percentage of the fare while taxes go somewhere else.

Rather than a facsimile, I’d just call the LibreOffice ribbon a distant cousin because they’re both office applications. The ribbon does slightly ease the friction of getting people to try LibreOffice, but like with the Windows UI and KDE Plasma, the similarities are surface-level and there are tons of differences. It’d be cool if public education taught people the UI of the commons first, not of the Microsoft defaults.

Chinese investment in renewables so far means they grow renewables while also growing coal. Between 80 and 100 gigawatts of coal production were added in 2025. Unfortunately, coal and gas production is steadily increasing worldwide. Contrast G7 trying to improve own living standard by reducing fossil usage locally, with G20 trying to fast-forward economic growth by any means available. Wind and solar grow fast, but they add to total production, rather than phase out fossils, almost everywhere outside EU. Source is the same, just a different page: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by-source

Global North can’t pretend to be green itself while still externalizing harmful production and growing trade with countries ruled by people who don’t care about resource depletion and the planet remaining livable. I think there’s no alternative to focusing on producing locally (adhering to own democratic regulations, labor union negotiations etc) while implementing degrowth policies, both helping other countries do likewise and putting pressure on them to do so through trade measures.